March 12: Word-collection Day #4

This morning, in an effort to pick up the pace with which the group is working through the semantic domains that are to be treated, I sat down with each group and told them how they were doing. I began by highlighting what they were doing well and concluded with some concrete suggestions for how they could do better. I came away with the feeling that I had done a good job of communicating with them and that we would see a significant improvement in speed as a result. But at the end of the day when we crunched the numbers, it seemed that, with the exception of one group, not much had changed.

I've concluded, therefore, that this group of people--and perhaps this is a trait of the entire ethnic group--prefers a careful and thorough approach to the task of collecting words, rather than the "blitz" approach. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just that there's no funding to organize another couple of days of word collection in order to finish the folders that will not get finished during these two weeks.

Total word count at the end of Day 4 is 4,800. (Granary image to be added)

Sharyn Thomson, Director of SIL Burkina Faso, came down to visit today. She has been considering doing a RWC workshop in Buamu, the language where she coordinated the team that translated the New Testament into the Buamu Ouarkoye dialect, has read a lot about Rapid Word Collection, and was interested in seeing what one actually looked like. So she left the capital city around 7am for the 3-hour drive to Garango and returned mid-afternoon, so as to be back in the office on Friday.

We were able to make an exciting presentation to the workshop participants today. Pam was able to upload the words that had been typed as of Wednesday afternoon to the Webonary website, and today at the end of coffee break, we were able to show everyone the data on the internet. Pam will continue to update the website as more data is collected.

Pam showing the Bissa Barka dictionary data on Webonary to the participants

Tomorrow will be my last day here in Garango. I plan to return to Ouagadougou on Saturday morning, either with Pam (if she decides to go back home for the weekend) or by bus.